The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [81]
Inland, the sand began to rumple. Over the line of dunes, like the spiking 011 a manor wall the top of forest showed.
"I ought go have a look," Karlsson offered.
"Look your eyes out, for what I care."
The dune grass poked nose-high to Karlsson and he climbed the crest of a sand wave for better view. Before him now, swale of more sand, a couple of hundred strides across. Then a second rumple of slope, scrub evergreens spotting this one. Tight beyond that, forest thick as hear hair.
Southeast, though; southeast, the magnetic direction of this voyage: southeast the spikeline of timber barbed higher. Two plateaus of forest spread into the horizon.
Karlsson hadn't the palest inkling of what would mark the river Columbia, whether some manner of Gibraltar attended it—from what Melander had told of the river's mightiness and to go by this coast's penchant for drama of rock, that seemed fitting—or whether sharp lower cliff, as at the Strait of Fuca, simply would skirt away and reveal Astoria. A considerable opening in the coast earlier this afternoon had shown the Swedes disappointment. Only bay or sound, not vast river mouth. Wennberg still was ¡11 a grump from it.
And here, put as wishful an eye to this set of bluffs as he could, Karlsson could not believe them into likelihood as river guardians. They rose inland from the shore a half mile or so, and did not shear away as if a river was working at them. Greater chance that they wore just two more of all such continental ribs lie and Wennberg already had peered at on this coast.
... Not there then, where to hell is it? God's bones, how much farther?...
Eyeing around, Karlsson found himself unexpectedly longing for the narrow northern beaches, the wild scatter of seastacks, the tucked coves where they had made grateful camp. Even the clatter of gravel being shoved by the surf, he missed here. These milder beaches promised ease but nicked their prices out of a man. Mussels had vanished with the shore rocks, so desperation's larder here was clams, dug laboriously with Karlsson's ax. Pawing like twin badgers down into the tide line holes, Karlsson and Wennberg were all agreement on one thing, a desire for a spade. No, two things: the other, that boiled horse clams were furnishing survival but they were tough dismal fare after a day of paddling.
... Maybe tomorrow. Day of Astoria, maybe it'll be. Some day or other will be, ...
Karlsson faced back toward the Pacific. There was this, too, in his lack of preference for this new run of coast. On the sand expanse where the canoe stretched at rest and Wennberg was propping the sailcloth shelter, there was nothing whatsoever they could do to put themselves from sight. This beach held the canoe and its two men prominently as three sprats on a platter.
The rough tongue of the wind started on their shelter early in the night.
Noise of the sailcloth bucking woke Wennberg a minute after Karlsson.
"Blowing solid, sounds like," the blacksmith imparted. And the next minute, was slumbering again.
Karlsson, though, still lay awake when rain began to edge into the wind sound.
By morning, the storm was major. The tide was up so alarmingly that Karlsson at once went and drove a stake of driftwood into the sand with the flat of his ax, as a mark to watch the inflow against. Sails of spray flew in off the wave crests, and the wind struck so strong now that even its noise seemed to push into Wennberg and Karlsson. And all that day as the two hunched under the shelter when they weren't having to foray out for firewood or to try to dig clams; all that day, downpour. At New Archangel they had known every manner of rain, but none of it anything to this. This was as if the sky was trying to step on them.
The Indian arrived at the Astoria customs house with an item and a tale. South from the village bis people called Hosett he had gone to hunt seals but soon sighted instead a great tangle of kelp brought inshore by the tide, and the kelp had seined in with it the body of a white person. Now be had adventured downcoast aboard a